Half an hour of my life, gone. And I don't even want to think about the brain damage.
Your brain damage or hers?;)
I find that anytime a tech expert is explaining something like that to someone who is totally clueless, both should have between 2-4 drinks first. It really helps.
Has this arrangement ever been tested in court? My assumption was that a party would have to have legal standing to actually pursue litigation, which your licensee wouldn't have. In other words, you can't make the court recognize them as a valid litigant. But then I'm not a lawyer, so there you go.
If a new release is coming, it's his job to find a way to get his staff trained to support it and to make the others in management understand the necessity for staff training ahead of the release.
You can't manage by fiat - just because you declare something so doesn't make it remotely possible, let alone feasible. And I don't care what your pay grade is.
If I come to the Software VP and tell him to develop an OS over the weekend, I can't just use the "you're a VP, make it happen" line. You're using the Homer Simpson "could you be working harder?" school of management.
The release didn't just happen out of the blue. His staff didn't get trained because he didn't make it happen.
How about some blame on the software VP for screwing up in the first place? They didn't get trained because there's only 168 hours in the week, and it sounds like they were working most of them already.
Unless you're doing the discovery yourself, nothing is "original research". Unless you verify the results yourself, it is just a matter of degree how far away you are from THE ORIGINAL source.
Untrue. If you're using the original document as an account of what happened (say, a historical document) to form your own conclusions, that's research. The research is in forming your own ideas and conclusions, not whether you generate the evidence yourself. Even in science, the guy who does the meat of the research isn't the guy with his hands on the machine, but the guy analyzing the data.
This is the fallacy of the whole anti-Wikipedia, anti-web. What is important is that the information is sourced back to its closest point possible.
Most scholars are simply anti-encyclopedia, though some do throw a dose of 'anti-web' on top. Using Wiki as a starting point to find good sources is fine, in any event. But once you get into your project, when you're forming your own ideas, you don't need the encyclopedia because by then you know what information you need, and look for it directly.
If Wikipedia does a great job of anything, it is summarizing that information so that most people interested in the subject can find accurate (or relatively accurate) information that is sourced.
Inasmuch as it's an encyclopedia (and a good one, in my opinion), that's its job. To summarize best-available existing knowledge for people who need to know about a subject. Note that Wikipedia will not come up with new ideas for you - that's the job of research.
The pointy head crowd is pissed because their lies have been exposed. People don't have to go to the Ivory Towers anymore.
Ad hominem attack aside, that's completely missing the point. If that's the substance argument, Gutenberg blew up those ivory towers by inventing the printing press long before the web contributed likewise. Note that the point isn't that only professors should be doing research - the point is that people of any stripe who are doing research shouldn't be using Wikipedia as their source. If anything, that's a completely populist message because it applies to researchers of all abilities, from junior high on up. Someone who were a true 'ivory tower' jackass would *encourage* people to use the doled-out facts in Wikipedia as opposed to searching more broadly for original sources.
Wikipedia doesn't thrive because we don't care about standards of evaluation; Wikipedia thrives because curious, thirsty minds seek answers they can afford and are available. I can, with my cell phone, answer just about any question I have, and Wikipedia is the easiest way to go about it.
The general complaint isn't that Wiki's being used for purposes such as that; your questions that can be answered in 15 seconds probably don't qualify as scholarly research. Encyclopedias being used for original research is the problem. As pointed out, it's not new, and the "online" part really only becomes a problem with the occasional defacement. I remember people citing World Book when I was in high school, the only reason Wiki's more of a problem is that it's more popular.
As for textbooks being expensive...Wiki doesn't replace the texts that would be used in the course of a college education. You're comparing apples and antelopes.
Wikipedia is an excellent research tool, and the professors are wrong to say otherwise - but you cannot cite it as a source, and a student would be foolish to do so.
You can research a subject by entering it into Google, but you wouldn't cite the Google results page in a paper. Instead, you read what the results say, find out where they got their information from, and trace the facts back to an authority you can safely cite.
That's not research in the sense that it's being used here - ie, "original research." You're confusing "search" with "research".
When someone says "Wiki's not to be used for research", that's what they mean. Google actually can be a research tool (though a method of last resort), in that you can find a wide variety of raw, disparate information you can use for your own research.
Performing real research is the act of either producing your own results (like in a lab), or using a variety of primary sources as information to form your own ideas. Wiki would be bad for that.
It's called a chilling effect [wikipedia.org]. If this is upheld, it will send the message that if you criticise pseudo-science, you are in danger of being dragged before a court and having all your personal details examined for no good reason.
Don't forget potentially bankrupted by attorney's fees! Yay! Do I want to retire someday, send my kids to college, or protect my 1st Amendment rights?
What I am arguing against is the idea that yellow means "floor the gas". The people arguing on this thread are complaining about how taking off a couple of seconds means they no longer can make it through the intersection when their duty was to stop rather than try to push the envelope.
I think you're arguing with yourself on that point. Everybody else is saying this:
When the light turns yellow, at some speed under the speed limit, I have two legal choices: brake or don't brake. Let's assume that gunning it isn't even an option. At some distance from the light you will not be able to safely stop in time to avoid ending up in the intersection. In those situations, you should continue going under yellow. Problem is, if the light's too short, there may be a certain region where you can't make it through without accelerating OR brake in time without ending up in the intersection. That's what people are trying to point out - it's not that people are trying to 'push it', it's that the light can get short enough that there's no legal, safe choice. And that's bad.
The fact is, when jurisdictions start playing with the yellow interval like that, rear-end accidents go way up. So the people who jam on the brakes in an attempt to not get ticketed just get rear ended. That shouldn't occur, and I think those people in particular should have legal recourse against the city/county.
That was meant to be a generality at that point, not with regard to mail in specific at that point. Sorry if that was structured in a confusing manner.
It is obviously a gift.
Clearly, they'll fight that notion. If I had to guess, they're going to try to weasel out of this, probably claiming that it's not 'merchandise', and thus not subject to the statute you posted.
In fact, the language in their filings sounds like it's setting that up - they were excessively clear to point out that the promo CDs are destroyed if returned. Were they not planning to claim that they're not merchandise, I don't know why'd they'd be so fixated on that point.
Just wait. These guys have very expensive lawyers, not "Lionel Hutz from the Simpsons" caliber lawyers. I'm betting they'll come up with a decent attempt at an end around that law. They have to, or else they'd get beaten by any lawyer on the planet. Since the word "merchandise" was used as the noun in every case in both those links, they'll come up with a case that it's not.
I'm not saying I'm agreeing with them, I'm just saying there's no way it'll be as easy as you think.
First, this is hardly relevant to most of us. It addresses whether something that isn't sold comes under first sale, which isn't relevant in the vast majority of the cases because the RIAA isn't kind enough to give music to most of us for free.
Second, they're not stating that first sale is invalid (as has been postulated in the past), they're just claiming that ownership of the property hasn't been transferred. This is a simple property issue, with the ultimate answer determining whether "first sale" *applies*. But it's not attacking first sale itself. The only question here is who owns the CD, whether it's a gift or not.
If they win this, then it's legal for me to send you a CD (completely unsolicited), with a sticker that says you owe me $5, because it will have shown any label to be binding.
Not true. First, that exact scenario has been made illegal absent the notion of first sale, because mail-order companies abused it decades ago. Second, that scenario would involve an explicit transfer of ownership - something the record companies are claiming hasn't occurred in the first place. Their contention is that this CD is theirs, they're loaning it to you in an unsolicited manner. That's different than attempting to unilaterally establish a contract, which is what's happening in your scenario.
Seems fairly simple to me - they're handing you something but still asserting that it's theirs. So long as no money is transferred, that seems somewhat reasonable. I mean, you wouldn't claim the library is gifting you books when you check them out, would you? So the question is whether the unsolicited nature makes a loan impossible. I'm not a lawyer but I briefly read the EFF's responses, and they seem to assert that the CD couldn't have been a loan but I didn't see where they provided any sort of precedent for that.
The basic question here is the same as most of the cases you see on daytime judge shows - is it a gift, or is it a loan?
I don't think this is a First Sale issues, since, clearly, the discs are at no time sold.
Whether or not this falls under first sale, the title is still misleading - Universal isn't attacking "first sale". They're claiming it doesn't apply here since they're not sold. That would exclude things like, say, second-hand albums that were actually bought. Typically inaccurate, incendiary headline.
Good. Better to have everyone traveling smoothly at a slower speed and safe distances than to have people packed in at unsafe distances constantly braking and accelerating.
Problem is it doesn't work. Where I live, if you leave a nice cushion, someone will move in and cut you off. So what you do is optimize the distance to maximize braking time, which means minimizing the opportunity for cars to cut you off.
Traffic's getting nastier all the time. I try to avoid driving.
We had this "bandwidth bill" back in the form of hours on dial up services. It sucked.
It would have sucked a lot more had the costs been driven through the roof by the 5% of users who are bandwidth hogs. Which is what happens now.
The divide is this - those of us who don't want to watch movies on our laptops or scrounge for pirated music don't tend to hog bandwidth, and would benefit from per-bit costs over the status quo. Those who do use these services like having bandwidth charges averaged over everyone so they can have other people effectively pay their bills.
The problem is, the ISPs will start offering cheaper capped bandwidth plans, which will draw low-bandwidth users out of your averaging pool, driving the price way up for the hogs to the point where it should be anyway, which is approximately similar to what they'd be paying per bit in the first place.
All "bandwidth bills" are going to make us do is take a huge step backwards in the form of good software. If someone isn't going to pay the $3 for downloading a 700 MB ISO for Ubuntu to try it the software is no longer really "Free" and we go back to the '80s style of paying for crappy software rather then just downloading it.
It's not free now anyway, it's just that someone else is paying for it. And the bill won't be anywhere near $3 for 700MB; maybe a quarter. If you're that cheap that you can't spend a quarter for a superior operating system then God help you.
And how does it make sense to refer to the generating capacity of all the power plants the US in terms of energy? There are no times, femtosecond or not, involved, watts are rates of energy consumption.
And by integrating that power over a femtosecond, calculus tells me the result is energy.;)
Over the duration of the 200 femtosecond pulse, it's perfectly reasonable to compare either the average power or total energy released to any other energy source, whether it be terrestrial power generation or the sun.
Then again, why buy and DVD? Personally, I would prefer to download it.
Because I don't want to watch movies with compression artifacts so severe that the characters look like their faces are being blurred to protect their identity.
IIRC most of the set scenes in the original movie were filmed at Pinewood Studios in the UK. I'm too lazy to check, to be honest.
Oh, hell. *googlegooglegoogle*
I was right.:)
Allright, well you didn't have to gloat about it!;)
That's what I get for being lazy in the morning.
The article states that a California court already ruled in favour of Mr. Lucas, but that ruling doesn't apply since Mr. Ainsworth is a Briton and most likely signed his contract under British law.
Well, Mr. Lucas is a Californite, and the movie was made in the US, so I'd hazard a guess that the contract was done in the US.
I think that holders of copyrights and trademarks are obligated to protect them or else risk losing the copyright or trademark.
Trademarks yes, copyrights no. This isn't a trademark issue, so there's no requirement to defend.
On the other hand, Lucas could make a sweetheart deal to license the trademarks and copyrights and not be at risk of losing the rights while also doing what sounds like the right thing by the person that contributed a huge amount to the Lucas "empire".
I don't know the guy, but Lucas seems like a real dick. I wouldn't expect that to change.
Obviously my experiences are not a guarantee of what will happen in Virginia, but as I said, I have been through these things multiple times and they have never turned out well.
Virginia's internet is fed by different tubes than Maryland's, it's totally different.
Granted, the person on the other end of the phone doesnt know or care about such issues as net neutrality. But she did ask why I was cancelling, and she did type in my response. So hopefully someone down the line will read it.
Someone will probably read it. Here's your problem though - what she typed is probably something like this:
Reason for cancelling: Customer is a jackass
You can't bust through the customer service morass when you're dealing with people making $10/hour who have been strategically placed by their employer as a defense between you and anyone who could actually solve your problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Half an hour of my life, gone. And I don't even want to think about the brain damage.
Your brain damage or hers? ;)
I find that anytime a tech expert is explaining something like that to someone who is totally clueless, both should have between 2-4 drinks first. It really helps.
Has this arrangement ever been tested in court? My assumption was that a party would have to have legal standing to actually pursue litigation, which your licensee wouldn't have. In other words, you can't make the court recognize them as a valid litigant. But then I'm not a lawyer, so there you go.
You know what the IT guy likes a whole lot more than that? Beer.
You give the IT guy a $10 gadget, I'll buy him a couple of rounds at our local bar, let's see whose problems he works on first. ;)
If a new release is coming, it's his job to find a way to get his staff trained to support it and to make the others in management understand the necessity for staff training ahead of the release.
You can't manage by fiat - just because you declare something so doesn't make it remotely possible, let alone feasible. And I don't care what your pay grade is. If I come to the Software VP and tell him to develop an OS over the weekend, I can't just use the "you're a VP, make it happen" line. You're using the Homer Simpson "could you be working harder?" school of management.
The release didn't just happen out of the blue. His staff didn't get trained because he didn't make it happen.
How about some blame on the software VP for screwing up in the first place? They didn't get trained because there's only 168 hours in the week, and it sounds like they were working most of them already.
Unless you're doing the discovery yourself, nothing is "original research". Unless you verify the results yourself, it is just a matter of degree how far away you are from THE ORIGINAL source.
Untrue. If you're using the original document as an account of what happened (say, a historical document) to form your own conclusions, that's research. The research is in forming your own ideas and conclusions, not whether you generate the evidence yourself. Even in science, the guy who does the meat of the research isn't the guy with his hands on the machine, but the guy analyzing the data.
This is the fallacy of the whole anti-Wikipedia, anti-web. What is important is that the information is sourced back to its closest point possible.
Most scholars are simply anti-encyclopedia, though some do throw a dose of 'anti-web' on top. Using Wiki as a starting point to find good sources is fine, in any event. But once you get into your project, when you're forming your own ideas, you don't need the encyclopedia because by then you know what information you need, and look for it directly.
If Wikipedia does a great job of anything, it is summarizing that information so that most people interested in the subject can find accurate (or relatively accurate) information that is sourced.
Inasmuch as it's an encyclopedia (and a good one, in my opinion), that's its job. To summarize best-available existing knowledge for people who need to know about a subject. Note that Wikipedia will not come up with new ideas for you - that's the job of research.
The pointy head crowd is pissed because their lies have been exposed. People don't have to go to the Ivory Towers anymore.
Ad hominem attack aside, that's completely missing the point. If that's the substance argument, Gutenberg blew up those ivory towers by inventing the printing press long before the web contributed likewise. Note that the point isn't that only professors should be doing research - the point is that people of any stripe who are doing research shouldn't be using Wikipedia as their source. If anything, that's a completely populist message because it applies to researchers of all abilities, from junior high on up. Someone who were a true 'ivory tower' jackass would *encourage* people to use the doled-out facts in Wikipedia as opposed to searching more broadly for original sources.
Wikipedia doesn't thrive because we don't care about standards of evaluation; Wikipedia thrives because curious, thirsty minds seek answers they can afford and are available. I can, with my cell phone, answer just about any question I have, and Wikipedia is the easiest way to go about it.
The general complaint isn't that Wiki's being used for purposes such as that; your questions that can be answered in 15 seconds probably don't qualify as scholarly research. Encyclopedias being used for original research is the problem. As pointed out, it's not new, and the "online" part really only becomes a problem with the occasional defacement. I remember people citing World Book when I was in high school, the only reason Wiki's more of a problem is that it's more popular.
As for textbooks being expensive...Wiki doesn't replace the texts that would be used in the course of a college education. You're comparing apples and antelopes.
Wikipedia is an excellent research tool, and the professors are wrong to say otherwise - but you cannot cite it as a source, and a student would be foolish to do so. You can research a subject by entering it into Google, but you wouldn't cite the Google results page in a paper. Instead, you read what the results say, find out where they got their information from, and trace the facts back to an authority you can safely cite.
That's not research in the sense that it's being used here - ie, "original research." You're confusing "search" with "research".
When someone says "Wiki's not to be used for research", that's what they mean. Google actually can be a research tool (though a method of last resort), in that you can find a wide variety of raw, disparate information you can use for your own research.
Performing real research is the act of either producing your own results (like in a lab), or using a variety of primary sources as information to form your own ideas. Wiki would be bad for that.
I find your ideas intriguing. I would like to purchase stock in your "tinfoil hat" company.
It's called a chilling effect [wikipedia.org]. If this is upheld, it will send the message that if you criticise pseudo-science, you are in danger of being dragged before a court and having all your personal details examined for no good reason.
Don't forget potentially bankrupted by attorney's fees! Yay! Do I want to retire someday, send my kids to college, or protect my 1st Amendment rights?
What I am arguing against is the idea that yellow means "floor the gas". The people arguing on this thread are complaining about how taking off a couple of seconds means they no longer can make it through the intersection when their duty was to stop rather than try to push the envelope.
I think you're arguing with yourself on that point. Everybody else is saying this:
When the light turns yellow, at some speed under the speed limit, I have two legal choices: brake or don't brake. Let's assume that gunning it isn't even an option. At some distance from the light you will not be able to safely stop in time to avoid ending up in the intersection. In those situations, you should continue going under yellow. Problem is, if the light's too short, there may be a certain region where you can't make it through without accelerating OR brake in time without ending up in the intersection. That's what people are trying to point out - it's not that people are trying to 'push it', it's that the light can get short enough that there's no legal, safe choice. And that's bad.
The fact is, when jurisdictions start playing with the yellow interval like that, rear-end accidents go way up. So the people who jam on the brakes in an attempt to not get ticketed just get rear ended. That shouldn't occur, and I think those people in particular should have legal recourse against the city/county.
You must like getting rear-ended.
U.S. Law disagrees with you [cornell.edu]
That was meant to be a generality at that point, not with regard to mail in specific at that point. Sorry if that was structured in a confusing manner.
It is obviously a gift.
Clearly, they'll fight that notion. If I had to guess, they're going to try to weasel out of this, probably claiming that it's not 'merchandise', and thus not subject to the statute you posted.
In fact, the language in their filings sounds like it's setting that up - they were excessively clear to point out that the promo CDs are destroyed if returned. Were they not planning to claim that they're not merchandise, I don't know why'd they'd be so fixated on that point.
Just wait. These guys have very expensive lawyers, not "Lionel Hutz from the Simpsons" caliber lawyers. I'm betting they'll come up with a decent attempt at an end around that law. They have to, or else they'd get beaten by any lawyer on the planet. Since the word "merchandise" was used as the noun in every case in both those links, they'll come up with a case that it's not.
I'm not saying I'm agreeing with them, I'm just saying there's no way it'll be as easy as you think.
First, this is hardly relevant to most of us. It addresses whether something that isn't sold comes under first sale, which isn't relevant in the vast majority of the cases because the RIAA isn't kind enough to give music to most of us for free.
Second, they're not stating that first sale is invalid (as has been postulated in the past), they're just claiming that ownership of the property hasn't been transferred. This is a simple property issue, with the ultimate answer determining whether "first sale" *applies*. But it's not attacking first sale itself. The only question here is who owns the CD, whether it's a gift or not.
If they win this, then it's legal for me to send you a CD (completely unsolicited), with a sticker that says you owe me $5, because it will have shown any label to be binding.
Not true. First, that exact scenario has been made illegal absent the notion of first sale, because mail-order companies abused it decades ago. Second, that scenario would involve an explicit transfer of ownership - something the record companies are claiming hasn't occurred in the first place. Their contention is that this CD is theirs, they're loaning it to you in an unsolicited manner. That's different than attempting to unilaterally establish a contract, which is what's happening in your scenario.
Seems fairly simple to me - they're handing you something but still asserting that it's theirs. So long as no money is transferred, that seems somewhat reasonable. I mean, you wouldn't claim the library is gifting you books when you check them out, would you? So the question is whether the unsolicited nature makes a loan impossible. I'm not a lawyer but I briefly read the EFF's responses, and they seem to assert that the CD couldn't have been a loan but I didn't see where they provided any sort of precedent for that.
The basic question here is the same as most of the cases you see on daytime judge shows - is it a gift, or is it a loan?
I don't think this is a First Sale issues, since, clearly, the discs are at no time sold.
Whether or not this falls under first sale, the title is still misleading - Universal isn't attacking "first sale". They're claiming it doesn't apply here since they're not sold. That would exclude things like, say, second-hand albums that were actually bought. Typically inaccurate, incendiary headline.
Good. Better to have everyone traveling smoothly at a slower speed and safe distances than to have people packed in at unsafe distances constantly braking and accelerating.
Problem is it doesn't work. Where I live, if you leave a nice cushion, someone will move in and cut you off. So what you do is optimize the distance to maximize braking time, which means minimizing the opportunity for cars to cut you off.
Traffic's getting nastier all the time. I try to avoid driving.
We had this "bandwidth bill" back in the form of hours on dial up services. It sucked.
It would have sucked a lot more had the costs been driven through the roof by the 5% of users who are bandwidth hogs. Which is what happens now.
The divide is this - those of us who don't want to watch movies on our laptops or scrounge for pirated music don't tend to hog bandwidth, and would benefit from per-bit costs over the status quo. Those who do use these services like having bandwidth charges averaged over everyone so they can have other people effectively pay their bills.
The problem is, the ISPs will start offering cheaper capped bandwidth plans, which will draw low-bandwidth users out of your averaging pool, driving the price way up for the hogs to the point where it should be anyway, which is approximately similar to what they'd be paying per bit in the first place.
All "bandwidth bills" are going to make us do is take a huge step backwards in the form of good software. If someone isn't going to pay the $3 for downloading a 700 MB ISO for Ubuntu to try it the software is no longer really "Free" and we go back to the '80s style of paying for crappy software rather then just downloading it.
It's not free now anyway, it's just that someone else is paying for it. And the bill won't be anywhere near $3 for 700MB; maybe a quarter. If you're that cheap that you can't spend a quarter for a superior operating system then God help you.
That's true, but reducing the distance between you and the car in front of you does increase traffic density, and thus throughput at a given speed.
Not that it's safe or I'm advocating it, mind you, but traffic flow dynamics aren't a simple thing.
And how does it make sense to refer to the generating capacity of all the power plants the US in terms of energy? There are no times, femtosecond or not, involved, watts are rates of energy consumption.
And by integrating that power over a femtosecond, calculus tells me the result is energy. ;)
Over the duration of the 200 femtosecond pulse, it's perfectly reasonable to compare either the average power or total energy released to any other energy source, whether it be terrestrial power generation or the sun.
Apple screwed up here, but "It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic" might be overstating it a bit.
Come on, this is Apple. They practically have a 100% market penetration among emo kids. *Everything* is tragic to them.
Then again, why buy and DVD? Personally, I would prefer to download it.
Because I don't want to watch movies with compression artifacts so severe that the characters look like their faces are being blurred to protect their identity.
IIRC most of the set scenes in the original movie were filmed at Pinewood Studios in the UK. I'm too lazy to check, to be honest. Oh, hell. *googlegooglegoogle* I was right. :)
Allright, well you didn't have to gloat about it! ;)
That's what I get for being lazy in the morning.
The article states that a California court already ruled in favour of Mr. Lucas, but that ruling doesn't apply since Mr. Ainsworth is a Briton and most likely signed his contract under British law.
Well, Mr. Lucas is a Californite, and the movie was made in the US, so I'd hazard a guess that the contract was done in the US.
I think that holders of copyrights and trademarks are obligated to protect them or else risk losing the copyright or trademark.
Trademarks yes, copyrights no. This isn't a trademark issue, so there's no requirement to defend.
On the other hand, Lucas could make a sweetheart deal to license the trademarks and copyrights and not be at risk of losing the rights while also doing what sounds like the right thing by the person that contributed a huge amount to the Lucas "empire".
I don't know the guy, but Lucas seems like a real dick. I wouldn't expect that to change.
Obviously my experiences are not a guarantee of what will happen in Virginia, but as I said, I have been through these things multiple times and they have never turned out well.
Virginia's internet is fed by different tubes than Maryland's, it's totally different.
Granted, the person on the other end of the phone doesnt know or care about such issues as net neutrality. But she did ask why I was cancelling, and she did type in my response. So hopefully someone down the line will read it.
Someone will probably read it. Here's your problem though - what she typed is probably something like this:
You can't bust through the customer service morass when you're dealing with people making $10/hour who have been strategically placed by their employer as a defense between you and anyone who could actually solve your problem.